April 19, 2019

Executive Summary

  • Our study attempted to determine a correlation between personality traits and academic achievement
  • Data was acquired through a self-assessed survey, where participants answered questions pertaining to specific personal attributes and ATAR results were recorded
  • Questions were then categorised by their respective personality trait - creativity, perseverance, and social intelligence

IDA

  • In 2014, the Australian government spent $13.8 billion on schools (APH, 2017)
  • Education is a key concern in fostering sustainable economic development
  • improvement of academic achievement amongst students is a fundamental premise in educational policies and management
  • Subjective nature of the study with varying degrees of response, observer and selection bias
  • Ethics regarding how candidates were informed

Investigating the Relationship Between Creativity and Academic Performance

  • Balgiu and Adir (2013): no correlation between academic performance and creativity
  • Academic Performance: Grades of students at the University Politehnica Bucharest

  • Creativity: Performance in creative tasks (designing logos, etc.)

  • Our Investigation: Promising results, but no solid conclusions which can be made
  • Academic Performance: ATAR scores

  • Creativity: Self evaluated response to psychometric questions

Investigating the Relationship Between Perseverance and Academic Performance

  • Perseverance is persistence of doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success
  • Associated with growth mindsets
  • No conclusive evidence highlighting a clear correlation
  • However, through Robbins, Oh, Le, & Button, 2009, a clear relationship is confounded by other situational variables outside of the students' control such as socioeconomic status

  • Box-plots posing inconsistencies in the median with large spreads across all qualitative measures of relating to perseverance with respect to actual ATAR performance (figures 2a, 2b, 2c)

  • Furthermore, weak correlation is ascertained via regression analysis
  • Hence need to consider confounders e.g. socioeconomic factors

Investigating the Relationship between Social Intelligience and Academic Performance

  • Social intelligence is a person's ability to interpret social situations
  • We investigated how social intelligence might affect HSC results using a self-evaluative survey
  • Background research suggested a mild correlation between social intelligence and academic achievement among high school students in India
  • The inconsistencies in the medians, the lack of a discernible pattern across responses, and the small sample size contribute to difficulties in finding any relationship between the two variables

Conclusion

  • Therefore, failure to discern any significant trend or relationship between personality traits and academic performance meant findings of the study could not be conclusive but only implied.
  • Given if the experiments were done with larger samples and more detailed and accurate testing methods, these could represent a significant improvement for our study.